"Come on and fight," sneered Kingallis.
Rhine shrieked in mad anger. "Fight?" she shrilled, "after you've shot him?"
Kingallis kicked Carroll in the abdomen. "Coward!" screamed Rhinegallis. With a superhuman strength born of sheer madness, Rhine hurled herself out of the hands of her captors and raced across the floor. Her fingernails came down across her brother's face drawing a torrent of blood from torn eyelids. At the same time she kneed him in the stomach. Her blow was more effective than Kingallis's had been on Carroll. He stumbled back writhing in pain.
But only for a moment—he straightened and cursed blackly, stepped forward and slapped Rhine across the face, hurling her back into the hands of the others by the force of the blow. Then he turned quickly for Carroll had recovered.
But instead of going to Rhine's rescue Carroll turned and raced madly across the floor. He hurled his good shoulder against the master switch, driving it home.
Relays slapped home—
And light itself was tortured. The very walls of the laboratory seemed to shake and waver because of the mighty electrostatic stresses set up in the continuum of space. The square, precision-machined equipment warped into non-mechanical distortions.
Vastnesses of energy flowed in a mad vortex. Steep gradients of electrostatic charge flowed back and forth like the surface of a stormy sea, and corona discharge hissed and trickled out of all sharp corners.
The nerves tingled and muscles twitched; normal senses produced abnormal stimuli. In one man's hand one of the weapons discharged into the floor and he tried to hurl it from him with a cry of pain. He could not open his clenched hand.
Twitching with every erratic reversal of the charged field that surrounded the area, James Forrest Carroll painfully pulled himself to his feet and looked across the shimmering room. Pride and self-confidence added to his will-power. He stood there as his tingling brain considered the facts of the matter.